‘Just say no to meetings’, says Shopify CEO to employees
Last year, Shopify Inc. spent money on cost-cutting now on cutting meetings. The Canadian e-commerce company announced it is performing a “calendar purge” as workers return from the holiday break, eliminating all recurring meetings with more than two individuals “forever,” while also reinstating the prohibition against holding any meetings on Wednesdays. On Thursdays, large gatherings of more than 50 people will be crammed into a six-hour timeframe, with a maximum of one per week. The company’s leaders will also advise employees to decline more meetings and withdraw from extensive internal discussion groups.
“The best thing founders can do is subtraction,” Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke, who co-founded the company, said in an emailed statement. “It’s much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time. As people add things, the set of things that can be done becomes smaller. Then, you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo.”
Large, drawn-out, and ineffective meetings have become a bane of the modern hybrid workplace, leading businesses to try and limit them. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., household product maker Clorox Co. and tech firm Twilio Inc. are among those that have instituted no-meeting days. Employees spend about 18 hours a week on average in meetings, according to a survey conducted last year, and they only decline 14% of invites even though they’d prefer to back out of 31% of them. Reluctantly going to noncritical meetings wastes about $100 million a year at big organizations, the survey found.
According to Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organisational science, psychology, and management at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, poorly run meetings can also reduce employee engagement and even increase their intention to leave. The amount of time spent in meetings more than tripled and the frequency of meetings more than doubled in the first two years of the epidemic, according to data from Microsoft Corp. based on thousands of users of its office software. However, a study of 48 million meetings by collaboration analytics firm Vyopta found that the proportion of one-on-one virtual meetings climbed from 17% in 2020 to 42% last year, suggesting that businesses are attempting to limit participant numbers.
Shopify said that a bot will serve as the policy’s enforcer, reminding meeting organizers of the new rules starting Jan. 5.
The meeting purge is Shopify’s most recent worker experiment. Soon after the epidemic began in May 2020, Shopify become “digital by design,” allowing all employees to work whenever and wherever they want. Shopify modified its compensation policies last year to allow employees to choose how much of their remuneration will be in cash versus equity rather than having management pick the balance, in the midst of market volatility that is pummelling shares of technology businesses.
‘Just say no to meetings’, says Shopify CEO
The most recent adjustments coincide with a corporate-wide effort to minimise costs. The company offers capabilities for in-store transactions as well as the ability for merchants to set up websites for online sales, manage inventory, and process payments. It was among the hottest pandemic stocks as online shopping boomed and became Canada’s most valuable company, but the shares plummeted 75% last year. Shopify cut about 1,000 jobs from its workforce of 10,000 over the summer as Lutke acknowledged that he overestimated the pandemic’s impact on e-commerce.
According to studies from France’s NEOMA Business School, no-meeting regulations can increase productivity and lower staff stress. At Shopify, however, meetings are still happening occasionally. Before anyone can reschedule a cancelled meeting, the business said that there will be a “two-week cooling off period.” It announced that going forward, it will only use Slack as an instant messenger and reserve the use of “large, unweildy” chat groups for announcements.
